Freedom of expression?

[ProSense]

Shoe-throwing journalist sentenced to 3 years in prison

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) - Muntadher al-Zaidi, the man seen as a hero in some circles for throwing his shoes at then-U.S. President George W. Bush, was sentenced to three years in prison Thursday by an Iraqi court.

Al-Zaidi threw his shoes at Bush during a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in December in Baghdad.

<...>

In the Middle East, throwing shoes at someone is traditionally a sign of contempt.

Al-Zaidi's angry gesture touched a defiant nerve throughout the Arab and Muslim world. He is regarded by many people as a hero, and demonstrators took to the streets in the Arab world and called for his release shortly after the incident.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/03/12/shoe-throwing-journalist-sentenced-to-3-years-in-prison/

[ProSense]

1. The Cancer in Occupy

The Cancer in Occupy

By Chris Hedges

The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power. They were shut down because they articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines. And they were shut down because they were places mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe.

Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.

Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist. John Zerzan, one of the principal ideologues of the Black Bloc movement in the United States, defended “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the rambling manifesto by Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, although he did not endorse Kaczynski’s bombings. Zerzan is a fierce critic of a long list of supposed sellouts starting with Noam Chomsky. Black Bloc anarchists are an example of what Theodore Roszak in “The Making of a Counter Culture” called the “progressive adolescentization” of the American left.

- more -

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206/

[ProSense]

2. Doesn't the shoe bring back memories?

Thoses were the days, and Mitt longs for them.



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/14/1131751/-Romney-adviser-and-former-Bush-adviser-says-President-Mitt-might-have-prevented-embassy-attacks

#RomneyShambles
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021025768

[Igel]

3. I'll remember that trying to hit somebody with a shoe is just free expression.

How do you think that would go over at a Obama press conference?

Here, the guy would be tackled, arrested, and quite probably let go. If for no other reason than the publicity would make it necessary (unless he was somehow unsavory, and could be shown to be either a neo-Nazi or racist).

But that wasn't here. Nobody's making the great claim that Iraq is a bastion of free speech. A lot of those countries have laws that make embarrassing the government or insulting an official a crime.

Sick, that.

[ProSense]

4. Yeah, that's

"Here, the guy would be tackled, arrested, and quite probably let go....But that wasn't here. Nobody's making the great claim that Iraq is a bastion of free speech."

...likely what would happen. The fact that it wasn't here is the key point. Regardless of what we think of other cultures, they are not mirrors of American society. There is no, "yeah, but..."

Maybe one day the world will be homogenous, but until then, there are going to be deep differences in many gestures and practices, from a bow to a handshake to what's on the menu.